Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Six years after it was written, Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s firsthand account of his experience, Guantanamo Diary, was published yesterday in the United States by Little, Brown and in the United Kingdom by Canongate. (Melville House)
Publishers Weekly has raised $40,000 in its “Je Suis Charlie” campaign to support free expression. The publication asked for contributions in the wake of the attack at the Charlie Hedbo offices in Paris on January 7, and the money raised will go to five organizations that support free speech.
Speaking of Charlie Hebdo, French author Michel Houellebecq spoke in a recent interview about his controversial new novel, Submission, which was published the day of the attacks. (New York Times)
“I work line by line, paragraph by paragraph, obsessively cutting and shifting … I’m fanatic about matching sound with sense in prose as well as poetry.” At the Poetry Foundation, Catherine Halley interviews poet Susan Howe about craft, poetic influence, Modernism, and more.
Get caught reading in public: The Uni Project brings pop-up reading rooms to New York City’s public spaces. The Uni Project is a nonprofit similar to the Little Free Library, but instead of circulating books among its mobile structures throughout the city, the books are read on premises to encourage a sense of community. (Publishers Weekly)
“If Amazon doesn’t make peace with publishers soon, the celebrated works of some of the globe’s most cherished authors might become that much more difficult to track down on the web.” An article at the New Economy notes how e-tail giant Amazon’s attempts to control the publishing world still threaten to devalue books and their authors.
The latest scientific findings on the benefits of writing: New research suggests that writing narratives about yourself may change your self-perception and improve overall health and happiness. (New York Times)
